Yesterday I received a bright red envelope from Macy’s with four plastic cards offering discount. I immediately decided I would go shopping for my granddaughters. As I stidied the red envelope, I couldn’t help ponder over their excellent promotion.

The pamphlet said: Here’s to red, white and you. An attractive colorful envelop you can’t miss and a grabbing slogan. It worked for me and probably for many shoppers.

How do we promote our books?

Website: my son created mine four years ago and I keep updating it.

Blog: Yes I have my own blog although I have not been very faithful recently.Group Blog: They work well for me because I don’t have to blog daily. I belong to the Pink Fuzzy Slippers and post as much as my tight schedule allows me and Voices from the Heart where I post once a month. I am better at leaving comments on friends'blogs.

The idea is to spread your name around and support friends who will support you too.Tour Blog: It's a new trend I didn't try yet. Does it work?

Newsletter: I started one back in October, sent another in December and then got distracted and forgot to send another. What do you put in a newsletter? Enough to fill ONE page with grabbing pictures and interesting new information: Bookcovers, a few reviews, links to buy. Don’t overwhelm readers with a long newsletter. They don’t have time to read too much; and don’t send one too often, they will stop opening it.Facebook and Myspace are good site for short announcement to a large audience. Again I often forget to post there.

For print books:

Bookmarks, promotion items such as pens, files, …although I never bought a book because of a pen!Booksignings are excellent but don’t set your expectation too high. We are not Nora Roberts or Roxanne St. Claire. At least not yet!!! Reviews: good reviews help the sales.Excerpt posting on promotion site may help.Chat and blog on review site also help.Magazine Ads: Romantic Times,… They are very expensive unless you share a page with several authors.Contest or giving your own books is a great promotion as you grab a reader and hope to keep her.

So what are your favorite promotion tools? How often do you use?

If you like to travel and love to read, come and enjoy my international romances. I will take you around the world with stories that simmer with emotion and sizzle with heat~

BABIES IN THE BARGAIN, winner of 2009 BEST contemporary romance at READERS FAVORITE and 2009 BEST ROMANCE NOVEL at Preditors & Editors Readers Poll.Rx FOR TRUST: 5 stars at Readers Favorite.

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Excellent post, Mona. Funny you should ask because I've been giving this a lot of thought lately. Even launched a promo campaign on Yahoo, not sure yet if it's worth it. I got a certain amount of advertising credits for updating my GoDaddy account and then I added some money to the pot. Have one campaign and different accounts with differing ads and keywords for each book under that main campaign. I also, with the help of Pam Roller, have spruced up my website and I work like mad on my blog, love my blog. And I guest on other writers blogs, do giveaways. I am forever sending out notices of new blog posts, giveaways, and new reviews as they come in on Facebook and myspace, Twitter too.I go in with other authors occasionally to advertise in the romance magazines. Lord knows, I try.

Mona, I can't help but admire the way you manage to handle your writing career and self promotion. You and Beth are super at keeping your names out there. Still, having a good book to sell your readers is the most important part and you both have that!

I'm still trying to figure out which promotions work best. When royalties come 3-6 months later, it's hard to tell what promo correlates to sales. I usually change one thing at a time and see if that makes a difference. I do know I enjoy blogging the most, and that since I started doing so regularly, sales have steadily increased. But is is coincidence or not? I have no clue :)

There's so much to think about, but I suppose that on-line promotion is the way to go for so many reasons. I like to receive bookmarks but will have to assess when my time comes...Good luck to you both with your books!

Beth, I just discover something better than bookmarks that can be done at home. You copy two or three or four bookcovers on the same page, and put next to each a three-sentence blurb, and on the back two reviews for each. Print the whole on picture hard paper. That gives you a great brochure for a series.

As I am not yet a published author, I don't know which promotions will work best. I've heard the internet is probably the best, but you have to be careful, because you can spend hours of time without tremendous results.